A Partition is an independant area on the hard disk. Hard disks can be divided into several partitions, which can be treated like individual drives. Since every partition has it's own file system, more than one operating system can be installed on the same computer such as Linux and Windows.

Most of the time, computers with a pre-installed operating system are already partitioned. This way the operating system is commonly found in the first partition (mostly C: in Windows), data in the second partition. Data can be saved even if there is an error in the windows partition. The program fdisk on a Windows starting floppy disk is able to create and administrate partitions (formatting) on empty hard disks.






Partition im deutschen Lexikon
Partition in het nederlandse encyclopedie